Glitter and Gloom: The Sketchbooks of Herzl Kashetsky
This eagerly anticipated hardcover publication will be launched at the Strathbutler Gala on Sepember 9, 2011
This major, profusely illustrated, book highlights select works represented in the exhibition Glitter and Gloom: The Sketchbooks of Herzl Kashetsky. Like the exhibition, it features four distinct sections, three of which focus on specific themes developed by the curators from their close examination of 7,036 drawings from the artist’s 119 sketchbooks created over a period of forty-five years. Allen Bentley, art writer and former professor, Department of English, St. Thomas University, discusses Kashetsky’s use of “the bounding line” as an esthetic instrument for constructing and deconstructing reality, thereby delineating the transitory ironies and visions of our crisis-ridden Western culture; Dr. Ivan Silver, Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, explores the artist’s lifelong work depicting human emotion (often Kashetsky’s own) through facial expression and his varied studies of the human form (often unworldly); and Terry Graff, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, focuses on the drawings as markers of human existence in time and place, highlighting the artist’s numerous self-portraits as meditations on mortality. A wide assortment of drawings selected by the artist himself, and accompanied by select quotes also derived from the sketchbooks, are presented in the fourth section. Also included are a biographical profile of the artist and a foreword by Beaverbrook director Bernard Riordon.